Over at Less Wrong there is a discussion on the Winter Solstice celebration. It being Less Wrong there’s a great deal of introspective analysis. That’s fine. When I was younger I did the “Solstice” celebration thing, though today at this age I think that if you live in the United States you should just own or disown Christmas. If you look into the history of this specific celebration it becomes clear that it isn’t so clearly specifically Christian in origin. The reality is that really just reflects the cosmopolitan materialism of the West of our day. Most people have reservations about the materialism, but there’s obviously some social and personal utility in the holiday.

In relation to another winter celebration, David Frum expresses the Jewish ambivalence toward Hanukkah, a minor holiday which had the fortune to be near Christmas on the calender. But Hanukkah is another example of “owning” something, and recreating it your own image. Frankly, I feel that in some ways Hanukkah was originally a celebration of the Al Qaeda of its day, the Maccabees. If you listen to this episode of In Our Time you can easily read between the lines and see where I’m coming from. The irony, or perhaps an expression of an iron law of history, is that the later Hasmoneans (the dynasty founded by the revolt) were themselves the sort of cosmopolitan Hellenists their ancestors disemboweled for their heresies. The Herodian scions of Hasmonean maternal heritage were  prominent figures in the court of the Julio-Claudians, before the Jewish Wars and the absorption of Hellenistic Judaism into paganism and Christianity threw up a barrier between Jewishness and the gentile world in 2nd century.

In any case, best wishes and happy holidays.

Image credit: Wikipedia

The assertion in the title seems almost trivial in an impressionistic sense. There really wasn’t a strong distinction on cultural issues between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976. By the 1980s there definitely was a gap between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis. And that chasm got wider as the years went on. I thought of this when reading this entry in Wikipedia on Jonathan Krohn, a teenager who wrote a book titled Define Conservatism. The entry in Wikipedia states:

The book outlines four fundamental principles of conservative thought: support for the United States Constitution, opposition to abortion, less government, and more personal responsibility. Krohn went on to apply the principles to current events and define whether specifically cited actions violated those principles…The book was dedicated to Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, Jr. and Barry Goldwater, whom Krohn describes as his political heroes, along with South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint.

What raised my eyebrows here is that Barry Goldwater did not oppose abortion rights. In fact, his wife, daughter and granddaughter have been involved in Planned Parenthood. If opposition to abortion is a key definition for what conservatism is, the reality is that conservatism didn’t exist before the 1970s, when that issue became polarized along ideological lines.

But that’s impression. What do the data say? For that, I looked at the General Social Survey.

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A new paper in Nature, Stepwise evolution of stable sociality in primates, was written up in The New York Times with the provocative title, Genes Play Major Role in Primate Social Behavior, Study Finds. As noted in Joan Silk’s article on the paper it should really be phylogenetics play major role in primate social behavior. The model outlined in the paper indicates that phylogenetic relationships between major primate clades is a much better predictor of social organization and structure than simple adaptation to a specific environment, or a linear increase in social organization (group size) over time. Both of these latter dynamics would also be driven by genetic changes, and therefore tie “genes” to social behavior. In other words, genes always matter, it’s just how they matter that differs. Here’s the section of the abstract of the paper of major interest:

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For several days I’ve gotten referrals from message board discussions about the case of Trent Arsenault. Trent is a “free sperm donor” (see the link for the details). For various financial reasons he can’t adhere to all the regulations which sperm banks are subject to. I don’t dismiss the concerns out of hand, but I object to the idea that this sort of project is a rational and useful allocation of regulatory time and money. I find one section of a Reuter’s piece illuminating:

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My working assumption is that this will be a regression back to the mean in relation to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I notice is that the projected budget for the two films is already more than a time and a half greater than all three of those earlier releases. Even accounting for inflation I suspect this is just a function of the resources now available to Jackson.

Though I assume it will at least supersede the 1977 Rankin-Bass production of the Hobbit (often parodied on South Park):

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Sam Snyder has gone through my archives back to 2006, and complied a “best of” list. Snyder admits that his interest is in “primarily centered on human behavior and health, which is the subject of most of these links.” Also, I want to caution you that 5 years is a long time, so please don’t assume that if I believe X in 2006, I continue to do so in 2011.

Dienekes and Greg Cochran have been talking about this possibility for a few years. But a combination of archaeological finds and the current unsettled nature of the human evolutionary genomics literature means that “Out of Arabia” is a real possibility (not laugh-out-loud crazy and weird). So I took the liberty of cooking up a new design for the RichardDawkins.net website. Science is about updating our prior assumptions, so it shouldn’t be too much of an issue. What I wonder: how would the population of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia feel about replacing Ethiopia and Kenya in human evolution documentaries? Addendum: To be clear, this isn’t to say I accept “Out of Arabia” for the origin of most modern humans, including within Africa. Rather, I think it’s not a crazy idea anymore, especially in light of the weird results which imply that West Africans may be genetically closer to non-Africans than to Pygmies and San (and it would make more sense of older uniparental results which imply back-migration from Eurasia into Africa).

Human cultural diversity

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One of the most annoying aspects of talking about human evolution is the rather misguided idea that cultural evolutionary processes operate in a zero-sum environment in relation to biological evolutionary processes. The colloquial rendering of this idea is that because humans are a highly cultural plastic species, we are “beyond” biological evolution. Many researchers though suspect that on the contrary, because of cultural variation and plasticity we may be buffeted by even greater evolutionary pressures than is the norm for a relatively slow-breeding species with a small effective population size. Probably the best example of this is the ability of adults in several human populations to digest lactose sugar. This is, to not put too fine a point on it, a freak ability. Why would a mammal need to digest milk sugar as an adult after all? Well, you know why, the human mammal is wont to consume the milk of other mammals, which it has taken into bondage. Viewed from the outside the whole process is rather weird and Frankenstein-like, but we’ve been habituated to the normalcy of this sort of thing because of the diversity of cultural forms on evidence in H. sapiens (though in some societies the initial exposure to the fact that Europeans, for example, consume milk and milk products into adulthood was perceived to be highly strange).

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Interesting piece in LiveScience, What We Learned About Our Human Ancestors in 2011. The author highlights the likelihood of a lot of admixture across very diverged lineages, as well as the nascent “Out of Arabia” hypothesis. This quote from Michael Hammer gets at where we’re “going next”:

“We’ve probably just scratched the surface of what we might find,” Hammer added. “We only looked at a small number of regions of the genome. This coming year, you’ll see a lot of progress made with full genome data. This year, we should be able to confirm what we found and go way beyond that.”

I think the the lowest hanging fruit in terms of “paradigm shift” was the renewed opening to admixture with “archaic” lineages in 2010 and 2011. Before that point it was reasonable for anyone to respond to these hypotheses with a recitation of the “Out of Africa” orthodoxy. Now no longer. If admixture did no occur, then we’re talking about strange results which still need explaining with a novel model (e.g., lots of “structure” in the “Out of Africa” population due to admixture within Africa). But as the low hanging fruit is picked, researchers are now going to spread themselves out throughout the grove, hunting for numerous odds and ends. In all likelihood the picture is going to get complex, but hopefully it will be more accurate.

In my post below Rob commented:

Surely the genetic evidence is pointing towards a single domestication event (see http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/11/new-data-fuels-dogfight-over-the.html?ref=hp)

My general response is not to accept the latest press release about the genetic origin of dogs. I keep track of the literature and it’s rather fluid. For example, I woke up this morning, and this is what showed up in my RSS, Modern dogs are more Asian fusions than Euro pups, study finds:

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